Danny Hillis has been an Internet user since the earliest of days. He registered the third domain name ever. He still has a book, a couple of inches thick, with the names and info for every person in the world with an email address in 1982. Today such a thing probably would be 25 miles thick.

James Duncan Davidson/TED2013

So if he warns that the Internet itself is vulnerable, it’s probably worth listening up.

Where many people today worry about the security of computers, the security of the Internet is also at risk, Hillis said. And that’s a problem, because so many of our systems — from phones to payments — rely increasingly on the Internet.

“We’re setting ourselves up for a disaster like in the financial system,” Hillis said, because the Internet is a “system basically built on trust, and expanded way beyond the limits.”

“The Internet is actually an emergent system. We don’t fully understand it, like the weather and like the economy,” said Hillis, the founder of Thinking Machines and Applied Minds, whose work on the Google-acquired Metaweb helped start the company’s “Knowledge Graph.”

“It’s changing so quickly that even the experts have no idea what’s going on. It’s different now than it was an hour ago,” Hillis said at TED.

“We don’t know the consequences of what an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be. So what we need is a plan B.”

The good thing is, a sort of emergency phone tree for the Internet should be relatively easy to design, said Hillis. However, he didn’t offer any details on exactly how this solution might work.

Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work

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